Sprint’s HTC One M8 is better than your HTC One M8

Remember that shiny new HTC One M8 you picked up recently? HTC just announced a new version of their flagship that is exclusive to Sprint, and it takes an already great phone and makes it even more droolworthy.

HTC launched with three colors to the One M8 line, but like the original HTC One there’s plenty of room for exclusive color variants to be launched whenever something cool happens. Sprint is happily announcing wider availability for their Wideband Audio functionally for higher quality phone calls. To help drive the point home they are taking the phone with the best speakers in the business and launching a special version with HTC that places and even greater focus on quality audio. The HTC One M8 Harmon Kardon edition is coming soon only to Sprint, and it’s coming in a very nice black finish with champagne accents.

Aside from the color, there are no physical differences between the HTC One M8 you can buy right now and this new Sprint exclusive. Instead, there’s a $140 pair of custom Harmon Kardon earbuds that match the phone and some new software to make the phone deliver better audio quality. The first on the list is Clari-Fi, and audio enhancement system that is soon to be found in the 2015 Lexus NX. Clari-Fi claims to be superior to BoomSound and Beats Audio in the way it fills the highs and lows often found missing from compressed audio formats. For every audiophile who immediately turned their nose up at the idea of yet another audio improvement algorithm, this One M8 can also handle 24-bit, 192kHz lossless .FLAC files.

Sprint will make this phone available on May 9 for $229 on a new contract, so while you pay a little more for this version of the phone than you would a normal M8 you get the earbuds for significantly less than if they were available as accessories. Despite their huge push towards moving software to the Google Play Store with the M8, it looks like the software that makes this One M8 special will remain exclusive to Sprint for the foreseeable future.